Building Gorilla Haven

A former Chicago-area couple plow their wealth into building a temporary home for zoo gorillas

May 17, 2009|BY WILLIAM MULLEN

"We have sunk all of our money into this enterprise," says Steuart Dewar, a stocky, lantern-jawed man with a weathered face but a soft-spoken voice with a pronounced British accent. "We're showing everybody that this is not just some frivolous operation to feed our own egos."

To raise money, the Dewars are opening the place, in a very limited way, to the public -- something they had always hoped to avoid. And for the first time, they also are asking zoos to help a little with funding.

"This place is my life's dream," Jane Dewar says. "I don't have any children, so it is what I want to be my legacy to the world, but we are in trouble. We think we can overcome it, but Gorilla Haven's future is dependent on our ability to fund-raise, coupled with support from the zoo community."

The Dewars are uncomfortable with these new roles, but believe the services they can provide for zoos will be valued enough to enable the haven to survive.

This confidence did not come easily. It took years for the Dewars to overcome the concerns of the zoo community, which had never expressed a need for such a facility and never promised to send them any gorillas.

Many zoo people initially dismissed the Dewars as rich eccentrics, says Kristen Lukas, who now admits to being extremely impressed by what the Dewars have built. Her support has been key to their success because she chairs the Species Survival Plan for gorillas, which decides where nearly all of the gorillas in North American zoos live.

"They had a lot of challenges, getting people to understand what they were trying to do," she says.

Jane Dewar knew all about those misgivings, joking, "Who in their right minds would try something like this? You'd have to be crazy to try it."

She says she and her husband decided to use the Field of Dreams approach: "If we build it, they will come."

Jane Dewar grew up attending some of the world's best boarding schools, the daughter in what she describes as a well-to-do but troubled family. Majoring in German linguistics at Lawrence University in Wisconsin in the 1970s, her fascination with gorillas began one day when she visited the Milwaukee County Zoo and wandered into the ape house.

There she came face to face with Samson, an enormous, unhappy male lowland gorilla that was one of the zoo's star attractions, living his life in isolation because he didn't know how to live with other gorillas. As a baby in the 1950s, he was hand-reared by humans, a practice that stunted his ability to socialize with other gorillas.

"I couldn't stand how people pounded on the glass of his cage, trying to get his attention," Dewar recalled.

"At some point, as I watched, my eyes met with Samson's. I know it might sound a little wacky, but I felt like we connected in some way that was almost spiritual. I started going to visit him when I could."

After graduating from college in 1975, she lived in Europe for a while, eventually moving to Chicago to work in the travel industry.

Wherever she traveled, if there was a zoo with a gorilla collection nearby, she haunted the place. That is not so unusual. Gorillas attract what zoo workers call "gorillaphiles," people so smitten by the species, they come almost daily. They learn the idiosyncrasies of each animal almost as well as keepers do, and the gorillas recognize and show fondness for them.

At the Lincoln Park Zoo's old circular underground ape house, a group called the "Ape House Gang" congregated every day, and Jane Dewar was one of them.

Trying to explain what draws her to gorillas, she says plainly: "I was abused as a kid. I looked picture-book perfect in my nice dresses and bright shoes, but something very wrong was going on inside. I think because of that, I was disassociated from humans.

"Gorillas spoke to my soul like nothing else. Especially the ones that weren't doing well, that didn't fit in with their own kind; they spoke to me."

Even professional gorilla keepers, who try not to anthropomorphize, end up describing their animals in spiritual terms.

"I have come to think that watching gorillas is like looking into a dark mirror that reflects back to you what is going on inside of yourself," says Peter Halliday, a respected gorilla keeper the Dewars brought from England to help build the haven. "I think that's why they are always one of the biggest attractions in zoos, why people stop and linger around gorillas longer than other animals and seem so contemplative around them."

Jane Dewar might still be merely a zoo gorillaphile had she not met Steuart Dewar while on vacation at a Canadian ski resort in 1982. When they returned to Chicago, Steuart Dewar, founder of Dewar Information Systems Corp. in Westchester, began to call her.

On one of their first dates, they drove to Milwaukee for dinner at a German restaurant where Jane Dewar had once worked.